> It's dystopian, disgusting and perverted
Correct me if I'm wrong, but for most of history, weren't "kids" already married and working to support a family when they were in their teens?
I know my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and a few before them were married before they turned 18. And two of my grandparents told me they worked at a factory when they were around 7!
Add to the fact that if you got married and then moved to another state, it could be years before you see your parents again.
After my paternal great-grandmother got married at 16 and moved across the country, she never saw her parents again. They did exchange letters but that was it. And according to my grandfather (her son), it was pretty common.
Marriages tended to be a bit older among peasants just because there was 'less of a point' but nobility had marriages at 12 or so - and not even always with a comparable age partner. Certainly not stating that this is /right/ but the point is that normal doesn't really mean much and don't look to the past for arcadia.
Really historically if anything kids are growing up 'slower' than they were for centuries - and that is a far better adaptation to our current needs - we need more skilled specialist work outproduces manual labor thousand fold.
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+age+of+marriage+hist...
https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-firs...
Median Age at First Marriage, 1890–2010
Year Males Females 1890 26.1 22.0
Adolescents are frequently at odds with their parents for the same reason 3 year olds are famous for temper tantrums: because it is part of the normal development of the human mind. Infants make no distinction between themselves and their parents; adults understand the difference completely. It takes about 18-20 years for that to develop, and there are well-known milestones along the way.
Teenage/parent conflict is certainly not a new phenomenon. You can find examples in stories almost as far back as there are records of stories.
> Conscious thought may deliver us to emotion, but the emotion that you arrive at is something that has always been inside of you.
Emotion precedes conscious thought; a big part of growing up is learning how to use conscious thought to identify, understand, and manage emotions. For very young children, emotion can be terrifying; it's great to feel happy but suddenly they might feel bad, angry, have scary thoughts, etc.--and it's all unexpected and unexplained. Teenage years are difficult because an entirely new set of powerful emotions, related to love and sex, emerge and the teenage conscious mind has to learn how to deal with them.
> What is the evolutionary advantage of making mothers miserable as a necessary part of producing offspring?
The answer to this obvious: to improve the fitness of the offspring. Conflict with parents happens during adolescence because adolescents are learning to how to be independent adults, and that means challenging authority.
Much respect to moms, but evolution does not give a shit about the mom once the offspring develops reproductive ability. Evolution does not give a shit about anything, really; I would not look to evolution to explain why people should be good to their moms.
So are conflicts between siblings of any age or spouses or friends. We however do not treat good relationship between the two as exception and toxic relationship as expected development the way some do it with teenagers.
Also, as a parent in current society, I suspect it is not so much child starting to see itself as distinct from parent at age of 14 (the kid should get it sooner), but more of parent loosing control. Teenagers were and will be moody and emotional due to biological reasons. However, a lot of other conflicts has to do with expectations and lifestyles.
Great point. At the same time, I think there is an evolutionary pressure to rebel and fight against parental control. Those that were obedient and stayed quietly at home might have never ventured out to explore and discover new things. Eventually those that did, ended up spreading their genes better so to speak. If parent don't know what you're doing, they can't control you and tell you what to do.
Also I think at one level, parents might say, "don't stay up late", "don't date this or that person", "don't to go the dance club". But at the same time if the child listened and actually stayed in the house and were as obedient as the parent insists, they might eventually disappoint the parent.
Another thing that I observed is that some parents cannot handle this rebelliousness well and it spirals out of control. Ultimatums being uttered, other drastic measures, police being called etc.
And if I'm not mistaken it wasn't at all unusual until fairly recently for daughters to be married off and for sons to start an apprenticeship in their late teens. Only the necessity for decades of education for getting a job keeps children dependent on their parents so long.
Through most of history, in terms of "general", "average" lifestyle both parents have worked from dawn to dusk doing manual labor or. If they saw their (over ~6 yo) children during this time it was because the children were working with them.
It's always been normal for children to grow up and be less known to their parents.
20 years ago the same people would complain how their kids would go to the mall and they'd never know what they were doing.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. -- Socrates, ~420BC.
There are no primary sources of Socrates, so there are questions around anything from him.
However, in this case it seems to have come from a summary of Greek thinking written by Kenneth John Freeman in 1907[1]. It seems likely one of his sources was "a paraphrase of a quote (lines 961–985) from Aristophanes' The Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates."[2]
This information apparently came to light when Google Books scanned the Freeman essay, so the researcher quoted by Bartleby (in 1966) didn't know of it.
Furthermore, Plato did complain about this behavior[3] and much of what we know of Socrates comes via Plato.
Edit: Doing some primary sources research on Google books found the quote used in a 1947 newspaper edition[4]! And here is another from 1944[5].
That's interesting.. although I can't access the source itself so perhaps Google has mis-parsed the date?
More work:
https://archive.org/stream/crescent_1928-30/cr_v40_n14#page/... from 1928 (!)
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Socrates#Misattributed
[3] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+rep.+8.56...
[4] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=5H8VAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+c...
[5] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=q2IwAQAAMAAJ&q=%22The+c...
Teenagers have been sneaking around behind their parents' backs, trying to assert their own newfound agency and independence, long before the Internet existed. I'm sure parents in the 1960s worried about their 16 years olds "smoking the reefer" and socializing together in groups, late at night, without adult supervision.
I don't think it's unusual at all for a teenager to consciously make a decision not to share every detail of their personal life with their parents, so it's logical that if you want to know what they're really discussing amongst their peer group, look at their social media profiles.
When she was fourteen, my wife's mother was sent out to work in a carpet factory by her parents. Because that was the earliest age at which she could be withdrawn from school. The past was not an Eden from which we have been outcast.
> evolution
All that evolution can promise is strategies that have a reasonably good chance of perpetuating some of your genetics. It certainly doesn't promise to keep you happy or even alive after you've had children.
Children always had peer influence. But the accessible sexualized media streams -- have become an overpowering influence.
It is so powerful, that many have been brainwashed to think that it is 'normal' and just the sign of modern times.
Just like you, I do not think so.
Just looking at the salary/compensation of the folks in the enterainment industry (moves/sports/etc) -- it shows how disproportion their influence and reach is, compared to any other historical presedent.
Clearly, enterntainer skills have been 'multipled' by the TV, and now internet explosion. That makes them very influential as well as accessible.
It is not engineers/statesman/doctors/accomplished military personnel -- that drive the 'standards' and the influence.
It is, instead the folks from sports, entertainment and fashion industries.
They have their own set of standards (or whatever you might call that) -- it is based on sexuality, appearance, being funny, being dismissive and 'outspoken' for something.
The above traits, when fire-housed on our kids through the they information channels, are very difficult for us as parents -- to manage/reason about.
Where was their childhood when my parents had to go look for the sheep in the mountains all by themselves, even as they had just started in school? When their favorite little lamb that they had cared for for years became dinner? When the parents were too busy trying to scrape together enough food for winter to play with them or look after them? My point isn't that things were much worse then, but that it's never been easy. Things are just difficult in a different way.
I would also guess that sexuality is delayed later today than historically.
according to "evolution", which only cares about survival of the fittest. Those emotions may be entirely self-serving.
0) The History of Childhood by Lloyd DeMause (1995).
There could be plenty of reasons our hormones have evolved to make us act in ways that parents do not like.
Every emotion you've ever felt has been developed, whether by God or by hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. Conscious thought may deliver us to emotion, but the emotion that you arrive at is something that has always been inside of you. When feel something isn't right, it's a good indicator that something isn't the way it's supposed to be. There's no reason that the world would be made in a way where mothers of teenage daughters are supposed to be miserable and shut out. There's no reason that the transition of growing from a baby to becoming an adult should not be smooth and untraumatic for all involved parties. What is the evolutionary advantage of making mothers miserable as a necessary part of producing offspring?
The idea that the family has become such a secondary consideration in modern society, to the point that this mother is advocating to others mothers about the opportunity to vicariously know your own child via the Internet... It's nothing short of heartbreaking.
Nothing is more certain in my mind than the idea that it doesn't have to be this way, and historically has not been this way. Kids have been sexualized and have to grow up too quickly. Kids have been made into tiny workers that do busy work for most of their childhood, away from their parents, because both parents have to work.
It's dystopian, disgusting and perverted